


Usually Fine

by BlueParabox



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos in the Desert, Did I mention I am super into science?, Gen, Mostly Real Science, Post-Episode: e049 Old Oak Doors Part B, Real Science?, Some angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 15:19:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2114829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueParabox/pseuds/BlueParabox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos is stranded alone in the Desert. He told Cecil he would be fine and he would be. Because he is a scientist--and scientists are usually fine. ...He does not feel fine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Usually Fine

Loss is a paralytic. Scientifically.

A burnt hand would have thrown Carlos’s mind though a cocktail of adrenaline and pain into instant reaction. Even the slow cold burning of the terrible light tapped into some primal survival instinct that pushed his thoughts faster and harder, solving problems one after another without stopping. It was a frenzy of every emotion he could name: anger and pain and frustration and sadness expanding one over another like bubble-theory symmetry breaks in the early universe. They were proactive emotions, pulling him forward as they had for weeks in this desert. Pulling him onward toward that single purpose: Save Night Vale.

But now…Carlos _saved_ Night Vale. He saved Cecil. And the doors… shut him out.

He sits in the dirt, his semi-casual Tuesday/Thursday lab coat ruined twice over by sand and dust. He does not dare look around him because the desert he sees will not be Night Vale. Instead he stares down at the phone in his hands which had only moments ago been like one last tiny thread connecting him to Cecil. Now it is a phone. A phone with suspiciously stable battery life and even Wifi but it appeared to be by all accounts just a phone. How can he make a phone bridge the curved spacetime and bring him home—for more than a moment? Carlos doesn’t know. He is tired. The loss of Night Vale squeezes every last drop of energy out of him.

That is not technically true. Scientifically, he could die here and still contain well over a trillion megajoules of energy. Even sitting still he was breathing and thinking and his body was running many thousand chemical reactions to ward off the inevitable consequences of linear time, which might or might not even really exist in Night Vale, let alone here. The thought does not comfort him.

Dana had wandered this strange desert for months. But he is not like Dana. He isn’t like Cecil or Old Woman Josie or John Peters—you know the farmer. He isn’t from Night Vale. According to the Universe, he doesn’t even really belong there. How could he really expect to get back?

He is a scientist. A scientist is usually fine.

He didn’t feel fine. He didn’t even feel like a scientist. He felt like nothing. A heaping pile of nothing in the middle of a desert that is not his home, missing another desert that was also not his home. Apparently.

How could Nothing ever expect to be fine? Nothing didn’t have Science. It didn’t have anything. What if there weren’t any doors left? What if after everything that happened, there was nothing left to connect Night Vale to this strange Desert at all?

He looks up and there is a blinking light on the mountain. He has seen it before. He has, after all, been wandering this desert for weeks with Dana and the Army and that angry Intern. But it is suddenly new and old and familiar as he realizes he has seen it before. Not just in the preceding six weeks but a long time ago. He saw it when the clouds were just right, lighting up a vast flood plain, in Night Vale. Others had seen it too. It was the same desert connected by a trick of the light to Night Vale. Why on earth would it do that? Was the mirage itself like Dana when she would turn her head back to Night Vale? He had seen it long before Dana even went missing. Almost the first week he arrived.

Wait…Flood plain?

Carlos sits up. He feels the dirt beneath him with his hands. It is dry and fine-grained, more sand than dirt really, clinging to his hands almost like dust. There is not a single ounce of moisture in it and yet...

He digs deeper with his hands and the ground resisted him. It clings together, somewhere between topsoil and a sponge—but still completely dry. He looks up at the mountain and it is definitely the same mountain. (Well it was probably the same mountain. It looked the same, but existence was a tricky thing he’d come to realize.) The sand stretches out beneath it like a vast reflective pool, a dusky mirage he had not seen under the terrible burning light that had threatened Night Vale. How could silica this fine reflect the red light cohesively? Or else, where is the water? Is this a desert after all? Why isn’t he thirsty come to think of it? He’s been here for weeks.

The dirt really is quite fascinating though—completely unlike anything he’d encountered, even in Night Vale. He’d have to take samples for when he got back to the lab. Carlos has some 10 dram vials back with his instruments that should work just fine for this. He stands up to retrieve them. A separate sample of the top soil and the under layer of course--they seem to have different properties. (He would have to use a pocket knife to get this second sample—not as good as a scalpel but a scientist could make do.)

The phone almost slips from his hand and with a sudden jolt he catches it. Millions of tiny electrical signals light up his brain to make something almost like fear. Fear of loss. He almost lost Cecil. Well not Cecil so much as a phone and potential future contact with Cecil. It would in fact be quite unscientific to conflate his boyfriend with a phone. But the feeling swallowed him still. He’d felt it once before at the hands of a miniature army as his own blood poured from him and he realized quite suddenly that he might die. He’d realized that nowhere was really safe and that science was not an impenetrable shield from the often random forces of the universe—not even in Night Vale where stranger more arbitrary things are nevertheless true.

Carlos holds the phone in his hand and it feels once more like a string connecting him to Night Vale. He smiles, and slips it into his pocket, comfort replacing the fear. He is not alone in this desert. He needs only follow that string to go back to Night Vale, for a little while. Cecil is not here with him, but their voices can be together at any time. And in this vast universe of endless possibilities isn’t trans-dimensional auditory communication enough?

Carlos looks around himself taking stock of which instruments are still usable. He is in a new world, a strange world. And there is so much he does not know about it. His universe has grown vast and strange over the last two years and it is still always filling with new things. New things to study and understand. Because he is a scientist. And he knows—smiling a perfect smile—that he is going to be fine.

A Scientist is always fine.


End file.
